Béla Bartók, Violin Concerto No 1

The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók was a piano professor at the Budapest Academy when in 1908 he solemnly handed over the manuscripts of his first violin concerto to Stefi Geyer. The girl accepted them on the express condition that the work should only be known after death. After her death, we mean, because the girl, seven years younger, assumed that Bartók would be the first to leave this world.

Stefi Geyer

Stefi was a talented violin student, a pupil of the Academy, with whom Bartók had fallen in love, in a crush, when the composer was around twenty-seven. With a marked personality and strong religious convictions, Stefi never reciprocated Bartók's feelings, due to the composer's introverted character, in addition to his deep atheism. But she accepted the offering, with the aforementioned requirement.

(In matters of the heart, Bartók fared better with piano students. Barely a year after his offering to Stefi, the author married a sixteen-year-old pupil, Marta Ziegler).

Béla Bartók, young (1881 - 1945)

Violin Concerto No. 1, posthumous opus
Stefi Geyer died in 1956, faithful to her commitment. The premiere of Béla Bartók's youthful work, his First Violin Concerto, took place in 1958, fifty years after its composition, when no one knew about its existence.

The work, in only two movements, is considered a sort of "portrait" of Geyer, where the author expressed his pain at the failure of love while drawing the beloved in two facets: a first movement for an "idealized, celestial and interior" Stefi, and a second movement for a "cheerful, witty and funny" Stefi.

Movements:

00:00  Andante sostenuto

09:01  Allegro giocoso

The performance is by the Brazilian-born German violinist José Maria Blumenschein, accompanied by the NRW Youth Orchestra (North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany), conducted by Jukka-Pekka Saraste.